Steve’s Blog

September 17, 2007

An Atlanta Treat: Drupal on Tuesday and Joomla on Wednesday

This week should be a lot of fun in Atlanta as there are two interesting CMS groups meeting. The Atlanta Drupal Group are meeting on Tuesday night and the Atlanta Joomla group on Wednesday.

Both meetings are from 7.00 to 9.00 pm at the 5 Seasons Brewing Company in Alpharetta. Their website is 5SeasonsBrewing.com and you can get a link to the site here. We have a conference room reserved over the brewery. It has an overhead project, wireless internet, plenty of power sockets for laptops and great food and beer.

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September 14, 2007

Run Video Perfectly in Joomla

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been involved in setting up a couple of Joomla sites that have relied heavily on video. Man, it was frustrating.

After a day or so, I ended up with a website full of every conceivable mambot, module and component, but none of them would work correctly:

In content, modules and other components
In all browsers
With the ability to resize each individual video

Finally, after a night to sleep on it, we came up with a solution. Read on to find out how to run videos perfectly in Joomla … oh, and theres a special free gift at the bottom of the post.

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September 12, 2007

Joomla Site Making Worldwide Headlines Part 2

After the Chaser’s week in the world’s spotlight, another Joomla website has caused an online sensation.

MarryOurDaughter.com received 20 million page views in the last two weeks and seemed to be a site where people could sell their teenage daughters into marriage. Prices varied from $20,000 to $50,000. Needless to say a lot of people were pretty angry.

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September 11, 2007

Dodging the Bullets by Tom Canavan

Sometimes an author really should put their biography on the front of a book.

Before Tom Canavan sent me his new book: “Dodging the Bullets – A Disaster Preparation Guide for Joomla! Web Sites“, I didn’t realise just how impressive his background was in this area. A quick scan of Tom’s personal history reveals in addition to working for many multi-million dollar companies, he’s worked for a Fortune 100 company helping to design and build out their disaster recovery solution and spent two years making sure the plan was as good as possible.

His book aims to teach Joomla users how to plan and recover from almost any conceivable disaster that can hit a website.

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September 10, 2007

The Most Important Quote I’ve Seen in Months

Sometimes you see a quote that perfectly brings together many varied, trailing thoughts you had yourself, but haven’t been able to sum up.

"It takes a hell of a lot of people skills to make money on the internet from home."

From http://www.emomsathome.com.

September 8, 2007

Joomla Site Making Worldwide Headlines

Ever wondered how a Joomla site would handle a Digging or Slashdotting? Pretty well it seems as one Joomla site has been part of the world’s biggest news story during the last week.

The Chaser, the Australian magazine / comedy show which upstaged Bush, Howard, Hu and the rest of APEC in Sydney with their fake motorcade, runs Joomla on their main site: thechaser.com.au. They use Virtuemart, Performs, Blastchat and a Rocket Theme template.

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September 7, 2007

Virtuemart SEO 5 – Metadata

Some components to a great job of incorporating basic SEO ideas giving you the chance to add metadata, unique page titles and more. Other components are so stubbornly opposed to basic SEO thats its best to just tell Google to ignore them altogether.

Virtuemart is somewhere in between. Its has been getting better of recent months, but one area in which it still needs improvement is metadata – it doesn’t allow you to add any at all.

Whats the solution? ….

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September 6, 2007

Virtuemart SEO 4 – Analytics

Google Analytics is far and away the most common statistics package for webmasters to use. Thats particularly true for ecommerce webmasters who often appreciate the fact that it integrates with AdWords.

There’s one problem: using GA in a mambot or placing the code inside templates doesn’t work well if you’re using an SSL Certificate.

Sometimes the tracking is lost and sometimes it leads IE to produce errors (usually pop-ups saying "Some parts of this page contain unsecure information. Do you wish to continue?")

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September 5, 2007

Virtuemart SEO 3 – Sitemaps

Today’s Virtuemart SEO tip is short and sweet: how to set up a sitemap for Virtuemart.

First Choice

By far the best choice is the SEF Service Map in combination with its Virtuemart plugin. After installing the SEF Service Map, download the plugin and upload it to /administrator/components/com_sefservicemap.

This plugin provides quite a few options including the ability to show/hide products and categories, and show/hide product and category descriptions. It also includes a .txt site map for Yahoo.

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September 4, 2007

Virtuemart SEO 2 – Search Engine Friendly URLs

Yesterday we talked about the downside of URLs in Virtuemart and how you can easily end up with too many URLs pointing to the same page. Today we’ll talk about how to solve those duplicate content problems and about how easy it is to use Search Engine Friendly URLs.

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